Letter 4 To BE or Not to BE: Studying Engineering in University
Dear Natasha and Nick,
I’m glad about your continued interest in becoming engineers. That’s a noble goal. But, first you have to get a BE (bachelor of engineering) degree from a university or technical school. Equivalent degree designations may be BEng (bachelor of engineering), BEngSc (bachelor of engineering science), BASc (bachelor of applied science), or something similar. Once you get a BE, you can legally put those letters after your name on your office door, business cards, documents, email signatures, letters, etc.
More importantly, enrolling in an accredited university engineering program will give you the systematic and comprehensive intellectual preparation needed. As with a house or other building, the foundation is the most important part that the rest of the structure will rest upon. If your foundation is faulty, the structure will eventually start to show cracks, spring leaks, and experience other flaws that may eventually cause it to totally collapse.
Others may disagree, but I believe a high quality engineering program should have a vision statement that goes something like this: “To equip the next generation of engineering students with an intellectual foundation, practical know-how, and problem-solving skills, so they can produce effective solutions for real-world problems.” Having said that, you should know something about the experience of a typical university engineering education. That’s what this letter’s all about.
Because I can’t possibly deal with every conceivable question or situation in this letter, I’ll focus on 5 key tasks required in a typical BE program and 5 key tactics for success so you’ll do well in your studies (see Figure 4.1). By the way, I’ve numbered the tasks and tactics in no particular order, so don’t try to match the tasks with the tactics. Also, some tactics are applicable to several tasks.
Figure 4.1 The tasks of a BE program and the tactics for success.
Some General Thoughts on BE Degrees
Let me start off by making some general observations about BE degrees before we get into the specific tasks and tactics that I’d like to focus on.
First off, you may wonder if it matters which university or technical school you attend to get your BE. If you’re fortunate enough to go to a famous university, then this may give potential employers an extra positive impression of your intelligence and abilities. So, they may take a closer look at your resumé when you apply for a job. But, other than that rare situation, in my opinion, it’s not going to matter very much to employers what university or technical school you attend. Other things will matter more. The grades you achieved in your courses will matter, since this indicates your general intelligence. The specific courses you studied and the skills you acquired will matter, since they show your suitability for the particular job. Any prior relevant volunteer or job experience you have will matter, since this will make it easier for employers to train you. And your personality and performance at a job interview will matter, since employers want to know if you are easy to get along with and can work well with others on a team.
Some universities offer the first BE year as general engineering, whereby all students take the same courses (e.g., chemistry, design methods, mathematics, mechanics, physics, etc.) to give them the same background preparation. The benefit is that it gives students some time and experience to better decide which engineering specialty (e.g., biomedical, chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical, nuclear, software, wind, etc.) they want to pursue in the upper years. Other universities, however, expect students to immediately enroll in an engineering specialty in the first year. The benefit is that students will have an additional year of specialized courses in their discipline upon graduation. You have to decide if one or the other approach is the best when you decide which universities to apply to.
Keep in mind that every year of a BE program may have a different difficulty level. For instance, the first year of my BE was expected to filter out weaker students, so they would quit engineering. I know this because at a public student orientation event, an engineering professor told us students that he expected that one-third of us would quit engineering before the first year was over; many, in fact, did quit. This was not surprising since the first year was the most difficult of all 4 years of the program—it had the most number of courses in the curriculum, followed by the third, the second, and the fourth year, which was by far the easiest. You should know that most university engineering programs take 4 years to finish. However, there may be exceptions in certain schools that require completion of a work practicum or that offer an additional business management component which can extend the program’s duration.
Moreover, typical BE programs have several different types of courses. The most important and numerous ones are mandatory and are sometimes called “core” technical courses. They are important because they will teach you all the fundamental knowledge and skills needed for your particular engineering specialty, whether that specialty is biomedical, civil, mechanical, software, etc. But, you’ll also likely be able to take a few “elective” technical courses that are from another engineering specialty in order to make you a more well-rounded engineer. They are important because you may end up working with different types of engineers at different times in your career, so it’s good to have a broader understanding of engineering. On top of that, you’ll probably have the opportunity to take a few “elective” non-technical courses from the arts, humanities, or social sciences in order to make you a more well-rounded person. They are important because they can give you insights into human psychology and behavior, so that you can design products that are more optimally suited to human wants and needs.
Although a BE program will keep you busy studying, consider volunteering for an extracurricular activity. There are plenty of volunteer opportunities available for engineering students. These could involve non-engineering groups, such as charitable organizations in the community, formal or informal sports teams, student clubs on campus, etc. Or, if you want to do something related to engineering, you can join the local student chapter of a professional engineering society, you could become a university student ambassador who gives speeches about engineering to high school students, you might want to be on the organizing committee of a science and technology fair, and so on. These activities can help you relax, take your mind off the stress of your BE studies, and help you live a more balanced life. It also gives you the chance to meet new people in order to start building your professional network of contacts, which can potentially open up all sorts of career opportunities for you in the future.
It’s also encouraging to know that you can begin work as a junior engineer immediately after getting a BE degree. But, you still need to write a certification exam, do an interview, and/or get a year or more of hands-on experience before you become a legally recognized “professional engineer” who can lead projects that potentially affect public health and safety. Many countries recognize the legitimacy of BE degrees obtained in other countries, so you may have some options to work abroad. Be aware that, in some countries, a technician and technologist can train at a technical school to get a certificate and then eventually do work that sometimes overlaps with an engineer. However, that diploma will still not carry the recognition, rights, responsibilities, or rewards of a BE university degree.
Now, you may be wondering if you’ll really need to know all the “stuff” you’ll learn during a BE degree—like concepts, formulas, procedures, techniques, and tools—after you get a job. The answer is, probably not. But, you’ll need to know some of them, depending on the job you get. Let me explain. A BE is meant to give you depth and breadth in skill and knowledge in a particular engineering specialty (e.g., aerospace, civil, mechanical, software, etc.). This is meant to prepare you for all the different potential jobs you might get within that engineering specialty. Yet, every engineering specialty can be further divided into subspecialties that deal with particular tasks. So, there’s no way the university, the professors, or even you can predict exactly what job you will get and what skills and knowledge you’ll need for the day-to-day tasks of that job. For your own sake, it’s good to absorb as much as you can, since you’ll probably use different parts of your BE education at different times for different jobs requiring different tasks.
And finally, a BE degree is highly prized no matter where you go in our technologically-driven world. So, don’t underestimate the positive impression that your degree can make even on non-technical people. There is a stereotype about engineers that you should leverage to your own advantage. Clients, colleagues, customers, employers, friends, and strangers may often automatically assume that you are intelligent, hardworking, responsible, detail oriented, able to deal with numbers, able to fix computer problems, and able to fix mechanical devices. The transferable nature of your knowledge, experience, and skills can open up all sorts of doors of opportunity for you. These opportunities could include things like switching to another engineering specialty, becoming a board member of an engineering firm or other type of company or organization, pursuing a career in another field, and so on.
Task 1. Lectures
Traditionally, BE course lectures have always been presented in-person live by a professor to students gathered in a lecture room at a particular time for a series of one-time lecture events. There are benefits to this approach. It can help build a good professional rapport of professor-to-student and student-to-student. The professor can make quick on-the-spot adjustments to the lecture material depending on how students seem to be responding. And students can ask questions at any point in the lecture to get an immediate response from the professor. But, there are drawbacks to this approach too. Everybody needs to gather at the same time in the same physical location. It does not allow students to watch the lecture multiple times or at their own convenience. And it makes little allowance for professors or students who get sick or who have scheduling conflicts.
With the advent of new audiovisual and internet technologies, several alternative options are available. Course lectures can be given live online over the internet to very closely simulate the traditional in-person experience along with all its benefits, but without the limitation of everyone needing to meet together in the same physical location. Course lectures can also be pre-recorded and then posted online. This lets students watch the lectures any time from any place as many times as they like and without any distracting background noise due to conversations and latecomers. Another philosophical shift is to incorporate a flip-the-classroom segment into the traditional or online lecture. This method reserves a portion of the lecture time for dividing students into small groups, so they can work on engineering design problems, perform calculations for practice problems, and so forth.
Task 2. Assignments
A BE course will require you to do homework that you will usually complete on your own free time when not attending or watching a lecture. Then, you will submit them to the professor or teaching assistant. They are almost always graded and will count towards your final course grade. How many assignments you will be asked to complete and how much each of them is worth can vary a great deal. Sometimes you will be asked to complete these on your own without consulting other fellow students, but other times the professor may allow it. Think of assignments as mini projects that are really meant to help you learn as you go along through the course, rather than just numerically evaluating your performance. Assignments could involve problem solving by performing calculations, inspecting and reporting on a failed gadget that you are given, providing small essays or verbal responses to qualitative questions, writing or verbally giving a critical review of a published research article, or any number of similar tasks depending on the course and the creativity of the professor. Keep in mind these could be completed in-person, on paper, via email, or using online technology over the internet.
Task 3. Quizzes, Tests, and Exams
A key part of a typical BE course is the quiz, test, or exam (QTE), which is a quantitative evaluation of your individual understanding of the course material. A quiz is often only worth a few percentage points of your final course grade, whereas tests are worth more and exams are worth the most. You will complete a QTE on your own without consulting other students. You will complete a QTE in-person in a room or lecture hall, or virtually online, but will somehow be monitored to make sure no one is cheating. You will often not be allowed to access any outside resources like a textbook or the internet while completing a QTE, but there are sometimes exceptions to this. You will solve some problems by performing computations, writing short answers, giving live video responses online over the internet, and/or providing in-person responses to the examiner. Now, keep in mind that although the professor may occasionally introduce some small twist to a question or problem in a QTE to see which students can extend what they’ve learned to a slightly new situation, the typical professor is not going to try to deliberately fail you or trick you by introducing a brand new major concept. But, if you do have a professor that routinely adds brand new concepts to a QTE, then it would be a legitimate reason for students to formally complain to the professor and even to the administration in the engineering department.
Task 4. Hands-on Labs and Projects
Engineers not only have to work with their minds, but also with their hands. To this end, BE university programs typically offer practical lab exercises to give you hands-on training for how to design, build, inspect, repair, and even dispose of devices, equipment, machines, structures, or processes. You should know several things about labs.
You will sometimes work with a small team of other students, so you need to hone your social interaction skills. Sometimes an individual course will have a lab exercise as part of the syllabus, whereas some engineering programs combine all the lab exercises into a separate independent course. The labs will be run by the professor, a teaching assistant who is doing their master’s or doctoral degree in engineering, or by a lab coordinator who is employed full-time by the university. A typical lab exercise may only take 1 to 3 hours to complete. You may notice that the equipment used for the labs may be older technology, since it would get rather financially expensive to keep updating the equipment each term or year for each new group of students. You will eventually be required to submit to the professor a final written lab report either individually or as a group. Labs and projects may need to be completed in-person in a physical location, or perhaps using some sort of online technology over the internet.
Although major course projects have some of the above things in common with labs, they are different in several ways: (i) they are not limited to a couple of experimental apparatuses located in a dedicated room on campus; (ii) there is much more time and work involved in a project, perhaps over a period of several months; (iii) you will need to work much more independently, although you certainly should ask the professor for help with any problems; and (iv) you will submit a final pre-recorded or live video presentation or a live in-person presentation to an audience composed of the professor, fellow students, and maybe even industry folks who may be the judges grading your presentation.
Task 5. Work Practicums
Some, but by no means all, BE programs at university offer or require students to work in industry for a time in order to obtain their degree. The total length of time and how it is distributed throughout the duration of the engineering program will vary from university to university and from country to country. In some cases, this will be built into the engineering program so that it still lasts a total of, say, 4 years, but in other cases this will extend the program and delay your graduation.
But, the intention, obviously, is to give students hands-on experience as an engineer in the “real world.” After all, there is only so much you can learn from textbooks and even hands-on labs or projects in a controlled university setting. Even so, many engineering firms offer on-the-job training for the specific task you will be involved in as an employee and, thus, doing a work practicum during your BE studies may not necessarily be of any great benefit to you in the long-term.
For instance, often the company with whom you did your work practicum will hire you as an engineer because they know you and your abilities. Also, in this situation, you are already trained and, thus, you will very quickly start contributing to the company’s goals and will make your boss happy because of it. But, even if that company does not hire you, the hands-on experience you gain will look very impressive on your resumé when you start applying for other engineering positions. Moreover, the people you meet during your work practicum will be a good start to building your own network of personal and professional contacts that can open up all sorts of opportunities for you sometime in the future.
Tactic 1. Personal Organization Skills
The BE program is one of the most rigorous found at university, in part, because of the large number of courses a student needs to take; thus, it requires intelligence, motivation, hard work, and a lot of time. The traditional “to do” list many engineering students use for personal organization is flawed, since it doesn’t require prioritization and it doesn’t assign a timeline. At university, this may be good enough occasionally for just a few days. But, for an engineering student trying to optimize their performance at school, there’s a better way.
Let me suggest what I like to call the “clompass” strategy. This is a combination of the words “clock” and “compass.” The “compass” part of this strategy deals with assigning priority levels to tasks based on your short-term study duties (e.g., assignments, lab reports, tests, etc.) and also your long-term educational goals (e.g., what grades do you need to achieve to maintain a scholarship? what course do you need to take to get hired by a professor for a summer job? etc.). Then, the “clock” part of this strategy deals with assigning specific time blocks in your daily calendar to only work on the most important tasks, and then assigning final deadlines for those tasks.
Here’s how that can work practically. Initially, you would organize your study tasks into 4 categories, such as 1 (important and urgent), 2 (important and not urgent), 3 (unimportant and urgent), and 4 (unimportant and not urgent). Then, schedule specific time blocks in your daily calendar to work only on important study tasks 1 and 2. Finally, for the unimportant study tasks 3 and 4, you either decide never to do them at all because there’s not much benefit (e.g., the assignment is only worth 2% of your final grade), or only begin to work on them if and when you are totally finished the important study tasks 1 and 2.
Tactic 2. Learning Styles
There is some scientific evidence that reading is the least effective way for us to learn a task, whereas hearing about the task, seeing the task performed, speaking about the task, doing the task ourselves, and showing others how to do the task are progressively better learning techniques. Whether or not this sequence accurately applies to every single person may be debatable, but the point is that various learning styles may or may not be effective for us.
Now, a good BE program will typically provide you with opportunities to engage in all these learning modalities to some degree, say, through reading the course textbook, listening to lectures, giving verbal project reports to a live audience, doing hands-on experiments, etc. Thus, it may be worth your while to identify your best learning style and strengthen some of your weaker learning styles, so that you can perform better overall in all your courses. I’d suggest finding a book, video, or other resource that can help you do an accurate self-assessment in this regard and then take practical steps to optimize your performance.
So, if you discover that listening is your strongest learning style but reading is your weakest, it may be possible to find an audio version of your course textbook, so you can keep up with the class that way. Similarly, if you find out that doing tasks is your strongest learning style but seeing and listening are your weakest, it may be possible to ask the course professor or teaching assistant to give you extra practice problems to solve on your own beyond those problems that are worked out in the class lectures.
Tactic 3. Study Buddy or Group
Although there will be opportunities for you to work with others on team projects, most of the BE program is geared towards teaching, training, and assessing your performance as an individual. As such, you will spend many hours alone reading textbooks, going over class notes, completing assignments, and doing calculations.
Even so, it will be greatly beneficial for you to find an informal study buddy or group with whom you meet regularly to discuss anything you didn’t understand in the lectures or textbooks, show each other how to solve numerical and other problems, divide up research tasks among several individuals who then report back to the group, and even prepare for upcoming tests and exams. Please note, I am simply talking about being part of an informal study or learning group; this is an acceptable practice.
But, I am not encouraging you to copy each other’s assignment or reports which the professor specifically asked you to do as an individual without other people’s assistance. This is not acceptable, it is dishonest, it amounts to cheating, and it could cause you to fail the course or be expelled from the program. Having said that, another side benefit is that some of these friendships that you establish with an informal study buddy or group could be the start of building your professional network of personal contacts that can last a lifetime and open up many doors of opportunity in the future.
Tactic 4. Speaking and Writing Skills
There’s a sometimes well-deserved stereotype of engineers as unable to speak or write in a meaningful way. The reality is that engineers often communicate to the boss, client, customer, funding agency, or each other on a variety of topics, whether it is identifying problems to be solved, presenting the designs of new products, explaining the results of numerical analysis, and so forth. Thus, one of the goals of a BE education is to make sure that students learn how to speak and write effectively. This will require you individually and as part of a team to create audio and video presentations, participate in team discussions, give talks to live audiences, write reports for assignments, projects, and labs, and send emails to fellow students and professors. There is an old proverb I once heard that says something like, “Reading gives you breadth, writing makes you precise, and speaking keeps you ready.”
To improve your speaking and writing skills, consider the following ideas: (i) find a good resource, like a mentor, book, video, or audio, on the topic of speaking or writing skills; (ii) visit the university’s student center, if it has one, which should have resources in this regard; (iii) ask your professor if they have any sample video presentations or written reports from their past students that can be an example to you; (iv) find a speaker’s or writer’s club at the university or a similar group in the community which will give you opportunities to get practical feedback as you share samples of your speaking or writing; (v) read engineering research articles or industry reports as an example of proper technical style and formatting; (vi) write down a basic outline in point form of what you need to speak or write about and then start filling in the details; and (vii) practice, practice, practice!
Tactic 5. Performing Well on a QTE
One good study strategy to prepare beforehand for a QTE is this: (i) choose a small number of sample problems (e.g., from the course textbook or from a prior sample QTE) that are representative of the various topics that will be covered; (ii) plan to work on several each day for about 1 or 2 weeks at most before the QTE, so your learning doesn’t peak too soon; (iii) seek help from your study buddy or group, the course professor, or the course teaching assistant if you have difficulties; (iv) attend any problem-solving practice sessions offered by the course professor or teaching assistant; and (v) don’t do any practice problems the day or night before the QTE, but do something else to give yourself a rest.
One good approach for writing the actual QTE is this: (i) first look over the entire QTE to decide which problems you know how to solve and which might be more difficult, but this will also give you a chance to calm your nerves so you can perform better; (ii) solve all the easy problems to give yourself some confidence and to accumulate points quickly; (iii) then move on to the more difficult problems by solving as much of them as you can to get partial points, but come back to the unanswered parts on a rotating basis because the solutions may come to mind in time; and (iv) if you cannot fully solve certain parts of the difficult problems, then simply write down in words the ideal steps needed to solve those parts of the problem, since this may be worth partial points too.
So, What’s the “Take Home” Message of This Letter?
The most important things I want to convey are that a BE university degree will give you the proper and necessary background to work as an engineer, and that there are practical tips that can help you perform optimally in your university engineering studies. It will require time, effort, focus, and creativity on your part, but the opportunities and rewards that a BE degree will open up for your life and career are surely worth it. I’m sure this letter hasn’t addressed all your concerns, but I trust it will give you some food for thought.
Kind regards,
R.Z.